Tregarvon was silenced for the moment. Then he broke out impatiently.
“I’ve got to know for myself, Poictiers. If I don’t stay with it long enough to prove up, I shall be a quitter. I’m all the other things you have occasionally called me, but not that!”
“No; I know you are not. I was just thinking: if you could meet Thaxter and talk with him? Possibly you could get the option time extended for a few days. You have a good reason for asking—apart from the real one, which is to find out what this drill-hole is going to say to you. You might urge that you’d like to have time to communicate with your lawyers. Suppose we drive up to Whitlow this afternoon?”
“We’ll see,” Tregarvon conceded. “It is barely possible that we shall get the drill in operation again to-day, and in that case I shall know definitely what to do. Do you lunch at Highmount?”
“I do,” laughed the golden youth. “The Caswells have adopted me, and I shall get square with them a little further along by financing the new gymnasium. How about paying this miracle gang? Have you money enough with you?”
“I haven’t, and I was going to ask if you would drive down to the office and break into the safe for me.”
“I can do better than that,” said the money-finder, producing a thick roll of bank-notes. “Money is the one thing I’m rotten with. I must go back and report for luncheon now, but I’ll be over again later on, and we can decide about the trip to Whitlow.”
A short time after Carfax’s departure, Tregarvon paid the mountaineers and let them go. Singularly enough, some of the volunteers did not wish to take money and had to be persuaded. The sums named were ridiculously small, and in each instance Tregarvon gave more than was asked, putting the larger wage on the ground of the value of the service to him.
In the settlement the beneficiary of the miracle made an attempt to find out to whom the timely help was owing, but the effort spent itself against a dead wall of mountaineer reticence—or unknowledge. The McNabb patriarch had “heerd” of the trouble with the valley farmers through “ol’ man Kent”; Kent had got the word from somebody else; and so it went, with the first cause either unknown or carefully concealed. Tregarvon did not press too curiously for the explanation. It was too much like inquiring the age of the proverbial gift-horse.
After the noon halt, with the glade cleared of the men and teams, the work of installation was begun. For a time it progressed handsomely. Rucker and Tryon were both competent foremen, and by three o’clock they had the engine and boiler shifted from the truck to its place behind the drill derrick, with only the steam-pipe connections remaining to be made.